Case study - Promoting music with Facebook

The Facebook ads campaign is a video ad with the text “Stream or download free independent electronic music tracks on Youtube or Soundcloud.” above the music video track with a “Listen Now” button that links back to Youtube and the video page. It is set to target USA, 18-45 with interests in a list of electronic/edm/house genres. I ran mobile only newsfeed, instant articles, and suggested videos. I made one campaign, one ad set within that campaign, and I duplicated the ad 3 times for a total of four identical ads. The same exact ad, just duplicated no need to alter anything. This ad set was also set to $5/day.

Side note: When advertising traditional banner ads on Instagram you should be sure to make the ad properly formatted to display there. IG traffic performs very very well typically, but can derail a campaign if the ad is not formatted well and performs poorly in that placement, in some cases certain ads will “stick” to bad placements and prices. The same reasoning applies to desktop, mostly right hand side, which is a unique format as well. Desktop newsfeed is usually fine with the settings I selected but with a small budget campaign like this, the less variables for the ads to optimize to the sooner and more accurate, as well as consistent, my results will be.

1/23 UPDATE

The Facebook camp has spent only $6 so far across the 4 ads but you can see the metrics here:

Note how when I do the breakdowns, I do so on the ad set level since we have too little spend to put any consideration into the individual ads yet. It’s probably too little spend for even just the global ad set data so I upped the budget to $10/day. As you can see the drop off from 3 second views to 95% views is immense, as expected. Facebook user’s video engagement habits tend to heavily favor shorter ads, and some users my have their settings not to play sound initially on videos. This kills the goal for musicians obviously.

1/27 UPDATE

The facebook ads account was banned but it didnt seem to hold much promise anyways with the average duration being so abysma

But as a general rule of thumb open targeting on Facebook is ideal, if you consider the settings I listed, there is definite reasoning for why I selected the targeting and placements options that I did. Now granted the bulk of my experience is in a different demographic and largely involves someone ordering a product, whereas music is very much so a younger demo, and younger demos are notorious for not converting on purchases, but if you have an actionable goal on an external link (purchase on your website, email subscription on website, subscribe to Youtube channel on Youtube) then the concepts are all very similar and these things are mostly like “best practices” to mind, but won’t hold true 100% of the time.